Brilliant Musical Mistakes That Made It Onto The Album

You would think that when artists find themselves in a professional recording studio tasked with committing their songs to wax, they would insist on every detail being utterly perfect. But in reality, this appears to be the exception, rather than the rule. This was especially true in the era of classic rock when, before the dawn of digital recording techniques, ironing out errors from a take was a time-consuming and costly business.

Instead, major artists would often have to sign off on a recording that they are barely familiar with. This is shown in the Beatles documentary "Get Back," in which the Fab Four, having recorded a take, then enter the listening booth and decide almost instantly whether what they have just played is good enough to be mixed, mastered, and released.

With comparatively little oversight in the studio, many classic records we know and love are riddled with mistakes. But many of them, it turns out, have come to be viewed as happy accidents, lending the recordings a bit of homespun charm or the impression of getting a glimpse behind the veil — an insight into the atmosphere in the studio when they were created. Here are some of the best musical mistakes that made it onto the record, which artists either picked up on and decided to keep, or which presumably made it into the finished product entirely unnoticed.

The Beatles' possibly misguided attempt at ska music, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is perhaps one of the most contentious songs in the band's discography. Created primarily by Paul McCartney but credited to both him and songwriting partner John Lennon, Lennon loathed the song, and recording it was a tense experience. Pressure, as we all know, leads to mistakes, but in the case of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" it added a pleasing quirk to the final product.

The track took The Beatles countless takes to record, a process that strained relations between the four band members. But even up to the last moment, mistakes emerged. Similar thematically to Doris Day's "Que Sera Sera," the song focuses on the lives of an everyday family as the years pass. It could have remained a simple exercise in saccharine sentimentality, if it weren't for a moment of strangeness created by McCartney misremembering the lyrics in the final verse.

The lyrics tell the story of a couple, Desmond and Molly. The former has a barrow selling wares at a market, while Molly is a singer in the evenings. They marry and have children, and "life goes on." But in the final verse, McCartney reverses the names, so that Molly finds herself in the market letting the "children lend a hand," while Desmond "does his pretty face" to prepare for that evening's performance. It was a genuine mistake, according to McCartney, but he decided to keep the error in. The lyric certainly jumps out on first listen, and the result is a portrait of family life that is surprisingly progressive for 1968.

Neutral Milk Hotel's sophomore album "In the Aeroplane Over The Sea" is a cult classic full of big, strange, moving tunes. At the center of the album is "Oh Comely," Jeff Mangum's visionary epic that touches on Anne Frank, whose tragic story was a major inspiration for many of the songs on the album, and details the perversions of an adulterous father, and more oblique themes. But "Oh Comely" also contains a strange quirk in the last moment which means the song ends on a surprisingly humorous note.

Lyrically complex and hypnotic, the track builds to several climaxes throughout its eight-minute runtime but ends with two changes of pace. First, a strangely uplifting funeral dirge, followed by a verse addressed to "Goldaline, my dear," which ends with the haunting lyric "Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine," delivered by a full-throated Mangum. 

By the end, you feel as though you have been on quite the journey — as had a member of the team recording the track, who can faintly be heard shouting "Holy s***!" in the song's final moments. Whoever shouted the outburst may also have been impressed by the fact that Mangum nailed his performance of "Oh Comely" in a single take. It's a moment of light relief after the heaviness of the track, but also gives a thrilling insight into how invested the team behind the album felt as Neutral Milk Hotel was putting together an indie rock masterpiece.

Another one-take wonder was The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie," a seemingly throwaway cover of a relatively obscure R&B track by '50s singer Richard Berry. The song took on a life of its own thanks to its ragged charm and glaring mistakes which made it a defining track of the garage rock genre.

The Kingsmen formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1959, and became teen audience favorites at various parties and clubs on the West Coast, gigging regularly. The band was revered for its high-energy live shows, and enough of a following that manager Ken Chase decided The Kingsmen needed to cut a demo in the studio. Circumstances were difficult. Not only were the band members exhausted from a huge concert the night before — and now recording at 10 in the morning — the studio in question wasn't equipped to record the new generation of rock 'n' roll musicians. Its usual clients used it mainly to cut jingles for advertisements. 

So the members of The Kingsmen found themselves recording "Louie Louie" using a handful of mics hanging from a boom stand that were too high for vocalist Jack Ely to reach without being on his tiptoes. At one point, he comes in a bar early with one of his verses, and he stops singing abruptly. Elsewhere, drummer Lynn Easton can be heard hitting his sticks together accidentally, and emits a muffled "F***!" right after. In other circumstances a band would have the chance to run through the song again, but what the musicians thought was the rehearsal turned out to be their only shot at recording the track before moving onto the B-side. They initially hated the recording, but it went on to be an enormous success, selling a staggering 12 million copies.

The Police's discography is replete with examples of the British trio's singularly pristine style of songwriting, performance, and production, which elevated its reggae-punk-infused tracks to be some of the most popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But surprisingly, "Roxanne," one of The Police's biggest songs, contains a glaring mistake which you have probably heard countless times.

The song was written by frontman and vocalist Sting, who was also responsible for the error that made it onto the final cut of "Roxanne." Barely seconds in, just as the song's spiky ska chords are beginning, there is a slightly discordant stab of piano, which, on the face of it, seems intentional as it bleeds into the sound of the guitar. However, it was a genuine error, caused by Sting sitting down on an open upright piano in the studio. That it was a surprise to him is evidenced by the fact that, seconds later, he can't help letting out a peal of laughter.

Led Zeppelin is another band revered for its keen musicianship and excellent production values, which have stood the test of time for more than half a century. But even Robert Plant, Jimmy Page et al. could also find themselves willing to embrace happy accidents.

For the band's fifth album, "Houses of the Holy," Zeppelin was recording in a mobile studio taken on loan from Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, with sessions taking place in the garden of Jagger's house, Stargroves. At the beginning of a take for the track "Black Country Woman," a plane flew overhead, seemingly ruining the take. However, Robert Plant can then be heard on the track imploring the band to keep it in.

The song was eventually released in this form on Zeppelin's next album, the acclaimed double-LP "Physical Graffiti," with the plane and studio chatter working as an effective introduction. The fact that it was recorded outside means there are other faint impressions from the great outdoors, too, including faint birdsong on the track. However, accidents didn't always work out so well for the British hard rockers. As hardcore fans know, the sessions for "Led Zeppelin III" involved drummer John Bonham playing with a squeaky bass drum pedal, which becomes impossible to ignore once you hear it on otherwise classic tracks such as "Since I've Been Loving You."

Arctic Monkeys was still something of an underground hype band when it cut its breakthrough track "I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor" back in 2005. Rather than spending a great deal of time in the studio refining a professional sound, Alex Turner and co. had spent almost the band's entire existence playing live shows around their native U.K., typically performing their songs at a breakneck, often uneven tempo.

This didn't easily translate to the studio, where a more consistent, slower pace is usually the order of the day. "They were very excitable ... Every time they recorded, they'd just go hell for leather, faster and faster," producer Alan Smyth told The Guardian on the 10th anniversary of the indie classic. However, Smyth chose to use the young band's lack of discipline to the song's advantage. "I decided to use a click track for the beginning of the song," Smyth said, meaning a metronome that the band members could hear while recording to help them keep time. "I said, stick to that and I'll let you go after the second chorus. Then I'll let you get fast. It gets more exciting because of that."

"Steven's Last Night in Town" is Ben Folds' wry 1997 paean to his friend Steven Short, a music producer who managed to drag out his leaving town over the course of many nights, becoming something of a joke within the friendship group before wearing thin. But as one accidental sound that made it into the track makes clear, the band still retained its sense of humor.

Ben Folds Five was two albums in by this point, but the band's DIY aesthetic still shone through on tracks like "Steven's Last Night in Town." As Folds himself recalled in a People feature published on the 20th anniversary of the album "Whatever and Ever Amen," the vocals for the track were recorded in a domestic setting, most likely one of the band members' houses. Just as the song reaches its climax, there is a short pause, during which you can hear a telephone ringing. It sounds as though it was part of the arrangement, but the truth is that whoever owned the house the band was recording in had forgotten to unplug the phone, and it was a real call coming through. Folds and his colleagues decided to leave the unexpected sound in, and it has become part of the band's lore among fans.

New wave band The B-52s created some of the most enjoyably kitsch and chaotic pop music of the 1970s and 1980s, with the 1989 smash "Love Shack" proving to be the biggest hit of the band's long career. The track emerged from extended jam sessions used to workshop material — leading to some unexpected lyrics arising from improvisation.

As vocalist Kate Pierson told A.V. Club: "We were jamming on 'Love Shack,' some of the instrumentation was pre-recorded, and all of a sudden it stopped, just as Cindy [Wilson, vocalist] was in full throttle, yelling, 'Tin roof rusted!' The tape had stopped, but she kept going. And that's actually how we got that part. It wasn't planned. It just happened."

Since then, the strange turn of phrase — which appears right at the end of the final version of the track — has taken on a mythic status, with some fans claiming that it is an obscure euphemism for pregnancy. However, there is no evidence for this, and Wilson has confirmed in interviews that the phrase just came to her as she was thinking of what the shack in the song might look like.

Metallica's 1986 track "Master of Puppets" is a classic of the band's discography, a performance that showcases both the rage of frontman James Hetfield and the uncanny ability of lead guitarist Kirk Hammett to reflect the tumultuous emotions of the song through mind-bending guitar solos — even employing happy accidents to help along the way.

As Hammett recalled in an interview with Guitar World, on the take that made it onto the album, he managed to fudge the solo to such an extent that one of the strings came off the fretboard, making a bizarre, unrepeatable noise. "We heard it back, and I was like, 'That's brilliant! We've gotta keep that!'" Hammett recalled. "Of course, I've never been able to reproduce that since; it was like a magic moment that was captured on tape. That was one of my most favorite things about that guitar solo. I thought I had screwed the solo up by accidentally pulling on the string, but once I heard it back, I thought it sounded great. That was definitely a keeper!" Evidence, if ever it were needed, that even guitar virtuosos are happy to embrace mistakes when they work in service of the song.

The Rolling Stones' 1969 smash "Gimme Shelter" stands out among the band's hits thanks to soul singer Merry Clayton, whose unforgettable vocal performance on the track provides a forceful and emotive counterpoint to the psychedelic guitar riffs and restrained, pulsing rhythm section. But even a consummate professional like Clayton is liable to make mistakes, especially when the recording happens at a moment's notice.

Discussing Clayton's session in 2012, frontman Mick Jagger recalled: "We randomly phoned up this poor lady in the middle of the night, and she arrived in her curlers and proceeded to do that in one or two takes, which is pretty amazing" (via WPRL). Jagger praises Clayton's commitment to the material, which included a set of lyrics depicting an apocalyptic and violent world, where horror is "just a shot away." The singer gives the track her all, to such a degree that her voice cracks noticeably two minutes into it, on the word "murder." Though technically a mistake, the cracking certainly suited the mood of the piece, and a moment later there is an audible woop of appreciation from one of the band members.

Clayton has admitted that her voice cracking was unintentional. "I was just grateful that the crack was in tune," she told Kasu's "Fresh Air" in 2021.

There are few rock anthems bigger than The Who's "My Generation," a swaggering track that confronted the old guard, telling them that the young people of the mid-1960s were sick of the past and looking to go their own way. "Why don't you all fade away," sings frontman Roger Daltrey, with the line given greater emphasis by Daltrey's delivery. The singer stutters theatrically over the word "fade," so that the "eff" lingers, triggering, for a moment, the chance that he is about to drop an expletive, but refrains from doing so.

Daltrey repeats the stuttering on other lines, too, leading some fans to suggest that the singer is consciously attempting to replicate the speech patterns of someone on amphetamines. Whatever the case, the vocal effect was only settled upon in studio during takes, with producer Shel Talmy saying it came from "one of those happy accidents" (per This Day In Music). If so, this suggests Daltrey had fumbled his vocal in an earlier take, but decided that his mistake was distinctive enough to repeat again and again. And as "My Generation" has proved to be timeless even among the generations of music fans that have come after, embracing mistakes is often a creative risk worth taking.